Jim Croce’s widow finally opens up about living, loving and making music with her late pop-star husband.
Before he was tragically killed in a 1973 plane crash while on tour, Croce commanded the radio airwaves. In the early ’70s, hits like “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," “Operator” and “Time in a Bottle” made the singer-songwriter appear like an overnight sensation. In reality, it took him many years of heartache and struggle to crack the top of the charts, and Ingrid was with him every step of the way, both as a musical collaborator and a devoted wife. The couple’s profound love for one another, first ignited when Jim was still in college and Ingrid was just 16, is infused into every one of these intimate pages. Her husband’s premature death was a nightmare to all who knew him and loved his music. For Ingrid, the tragedy actually began well before he ever climbed into that doomed airplane. At some point (which Ingrid traces to a horrific incident she experienced while on vacation), Jim began to change in ways that are almost as sad, frustrating and unfathomable as his untimely demise. She recounts the many betrayals and transgressions in a heartbreaking voice. This warts-and-all portrait paints Jim as a profoundly conflicted man who might have gotten his act together had he been given the time—but maybe not. For almost 40 years, fans curious about Jim have had to satisfy themselves with his wonderful songs, but now we have a more complete picture of the man behind the music.
A deeply candid look into the life and times of a talented artist.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-306-82121-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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